Hybrid system scenario/questions

[DarbyIT]

Hello everyone,

I am new to VOIP and I am looking at the 3CX system. It provides the features and integration (O365, Salesforce, and ACT!) that we are looking for.

The boss isn't sold on VOIP due to cost and hearing the horror stories from other people. That being said, he has given me the green light to look into doing a partial implementation for our Sales team. We are currently using an NEC DSX 80 PBX. The Sales team has 6 members. What would be best practice for setting up a hybrid with the 3CX and NEC PBX?

To keep cost down, my initial thought was all calls come in through the DSX and I would then need to connect it to the 3CX. I could get away with a 4 or 8 sim Pro license. My concern is what would I lose in translation from the DSX to 3CX? I know the key to the integrations is based off the phone number. Outgoing shouldn't be an issue, but incoming calls would I lose the Caller ID?

After thinking awhile, my next thought was to have calls come into the 3CX and then integrate it into the the DSX. I think that is my better solution, especially when it comes to expanding out to other users. However, I would need to purchase a bigger sim license. I should be able to get away with a 16 sim license as we have 32 extensions and I doubt we will use all 16 at once. Since the 3CX will be the main system, I would need the larger sim license to handle all the incoming and outgoing calls, right?

Also, does the sim license cover all sim calls, or is it the number of inbound/outbound calls? So if I have 8 inbound/outbound calls and 3 people on internal direct calls, would that be 11 sims used?

Any help and suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Again, I am new to this so I will probably have a few questions.

Thanks,

Mike

 

[leejor]

If your existing PBX can register as a VoIP trunk to a provider without additional hardware, then having it do so to 3CX, as a bridge trunk might be the most economical route to go. Calls first go into 3CX and are then passed to the NEC over the trunk group. You don't want to have to buy gateways, that will only be used for a short while unless you can make use of them later. Since 3CX would now be connected to external trunking, it would be simple to add extensions, ring groups and queues, to 3CX as needed. You could even enable, test, then revert back to routing the calls over the bridge trunk, if needed

 

[cobaltit]

My recommendation would be to run 3CX in parallel (old and new phones on the desk) and forget trying to tie the systems together. Use call forwarding from the DSX to get calls over to 3CX or just test on 3CX until you are happy and then switch everyone. I doubt you already have the VoIP module for the DSX since your boss is VoIP adverse so you do what leejor recommends would require hardware purchase and system reconfiguration.

Regarding what constitutes a simultaneous call, this is probably the best explanation:

https://www.3cx.com/community/threads/how-is-number-of-simultaneous-calls-supported-counted.8235/

Regarding the horror stories, they are all true . That being said, VoIP is simply less forgiving than other services. A VoIP solution that is properly planned and implemented can be just as reliable and more available than traditional PSTN solutions.